Need some help with "old Questar"

My familiarity with a 'Variac' is it is a large rheostat that allows control of the amplitude of wall outlet AC. It does not allow control of the AC frequency. So, I'm not sure how it would be used with a Questar.

I wish to thank everyone on this website forum that provided information to the previous posts/questions that I posed.

We have tracked down an extensive amount of historical information about this inherited telescope. Remarkably, we have also recovered a wealth of original hand written letters that were exchanged between my wife's uncle and Questar, all of which has provided an unbelievable and very personalized insight to the history of this telescope and my wife's uncle.

I did want to clarify one point that seemed to have no logical explanation initially, regarding the serial number of this specific scope.

In particular, I wanted to share this information largely for the benefit of those forum members who have historical interest in vintage Questars and may find themselves in the future trying to assist others regarding questions about S/N for older Q's.

The reason that our inherited duplex Questar does not have the normal serial number naming convention that employs the letters DP within the S/N, is not because Questar did not use the DP designator in the original serial numbers when the duplex was first introduced.

Instead, it is because our duplex began its life as a Standard 3.5, not as a duplex. It was subsequently converted to a duplex several years after its original purchase.

The information was revealed through the extraordinary assistance provided by Jim Reichert and the historical records he retrieved from the Questar archive files. Jim also advised us that there were only a few Standard Q 3.5's that underwent this rather substantive conversion in the early days, following the introduction of the duplex into the marketplace.

This information also demystified, why in the inventory of items associated with the scope that we inherited, there was an original anodized star map dew shield which incidentally did not properly fit on the barrel of our scope.

According to Questar, in order to make this standard to duplex conversion, the optical barrel had to be removed and in the process was no longer salvageable. However, the originally supplied removal dew shield would not have been affected by this surgical conversion.

I hope that someday this bit of historical trivia may be useful to someone on this forum and again I wish to thank all who provided insights to information about this scope along the way.

One last item. To those of you who routinely suggested that we actually use this treasure, rest assured that we have and fully expect to continue to use it.

These suggestions were very easy to succumb to, especially after obtaining a strong re-assurance from Questar that given the exceptional "as found" condition of this scope and with reasonable care, we could expect that this scope should be good for use for the next fifty plus years in addition to its existing half a decade age.